New from Cambridge University Press!

Sociolinguistics from the Periphery "presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users."

The book deals with the fundamental question of how language comprehensionand situational comprehension interact with one another. Using an oraldescription of a tour of Potsdam Square in Berlin as an example, the authorshows how pointing gestures interact with deictic expressions or pointingwords such as "here" or "there", enabling objects to be localizeddistinctly. The resulting theory on verbal and physical pointing lieswithin and between the contexts of linguistics, semiotics and gesture studies.